29TH OF SEPTEMBER 2009
I've got to type as fast as possible, avoiding that someone could spot me. I'm not working on the main project I'm assigned to, I'm not reading the documentation of the new one either. I'm just collecting some information for the next course I'm going to attend. Actually an on-line course, some professional training nobody should be aware of. I'm going to attend it overnight, stealing sleeping hours from my dreams. It's quite a paradox. Since that's my fight to defend my dream. My dreams in the real world that too many all around me want to steal. I'm a software engineer, working for a consulting company. I'm not enabled to meet the management. Technicians are deemed to belong to the mass of workers. It's quite a widespread concept. The last issue of the Harvard Business Review presented a case study where the developers of a fictitious video-game mogul, war games perhaps, go on strike as XIX century textile workers. In Italy is much worse. The enemy are the colleagues. Most of them entered the University several years ago. They never graduated because they had to spend most of their free time working, a couple of evening a week, serving at the tables on Fridays and Saturdays. The very same place they used to attend during the remaining of the week, socializing and arguing about the future and climate change. They had to. Theirs were working families, they said, they couldn't enjoy the privileges of the upper class. Their income couldn't cope with the cost of the classes they never took part to. I reached the degree, I'm the enemy. Just like after the Red Revolution. Some of them didn't attend the University either, they started to work. Now they want to share their years of experience, busy with trivial problems, with my theoritical studies and exercises. My degree doesn't value a brass farthing, they say. Yet, they are smarter, they add, since they accomplish my same tasks without an academic background. I don't have got to linger on books any more, they are my wardens. Luckily I'm a professional, or I'm supposed to be, a free lancer according to the Italian law. They can't track me on vacation, they can't ask me a sick note if I call in the morning and don't come. I've caught the flu, the influenza as a proper Briton would say. I'm taking a professional certification instead, they shouldn't be aware of. I could claim it just on my next project for another company. That's the world I live in and I want to change. How will my story take shape, you could read in the next chapters of what will be "A biography in the future of a polymath software developer", or "Escape from the XXI century DDR". You'll read how I'll manage to survive my daily fight against my colleagues, avoid the control of the supervisors and start an outstanding career abroad. Or, more properly, off-shore. You'll also learn my come back in Italy after the Wende (that will take place around the year 2040. I usually don't write a too accurate plot) and my involvement with the reconstruction of the country.
